[quoted lines by Matthew Campbell on December 4, 2000, at 17:03]
>it dawned on me that
>preset management could also be separated for the most part from the core
>of TRPlayer. It could be done in a separate program, which I would call
>TRPreset (short for Text-Mode RealMedia Preset Manager).
Good idea.
>And you'd go to a preset in a particular category like this:
>
>trpreset -c "Family Radio" "East Coast"
Are you suggesting launching TRPlayer from TRPreset? This is okay, but it
should be explicitly documented. You might also want to support a syntax like:
trplayer `trpreset -u "Family Radio" "East Coast"`
The -u option, in other words, would output the correct URL.
>6. TRPreset needn't be written in C; it could be written in a scripting
>language like Python. I'm learning the Python language, and it includes
>an XML-parsing library, so it might be a good choice.
"might be"? It sounds like a great idea to me. People will probably find
modifying interpreted source easier than modifying compiled source anyway.
>The downside is
>that a program written in an interpreted language is less efficient than
>its compiled counterpart,
With p[rocessors becoming so fast these days, I wouldn't worry about it.
>and you would have to install the interpreter if
>it's not installed already.
If in C, you'd have to install the correct XML library. Either way, something
will have to be installed if it's not there. A good interpreter, rather than
just a library, might be the better choice.
>Do you see any good reasons to
>integrate preset management into TRPlayer, as I was originally planning to
>do?
It would still be nice to have a "goto bookmark" interactive command. TRPlayer
could, of course, invoke TRPreset to get this functionality. This might be one
good reason to add the -u option to TRPreset. If done this way, TRPreset should
also be invoked in a way that makes browsing the bookmarks easy.
Perhaps TRPreset could have a -b (browse) option which would bring up a
browsable (up-arrow, down-arrow, page-up, page-down) category list. Selecting
(enter, right-arrow) a category would bring up a browsable (up-arrow,
down-arrow, page-up, page-down) bookmark list. Selecting (enter, right-arrow) a
bookmark would, depending on other invocation options, launch TRPlayer, output
the URL, etc. When in a bookmark list, left-arrow would return to the category.
This scheme would make it work like lynx.
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